HCL Submission: Reworked and more efficient!

Extensions to HCL 4.10
I have re-written the submission system for the HCL COMPLETELY today.

The problem that we have had with the existing system has been that it has relied upon email as part of its operating procedure. This has been a constant cause of headaches and I will have to admit a constant cause for lost submission information over the years; well no more!

The new HCL submission system is backed by one of the sites database engines and is not in any way communicating with our notoriously unreliable mail server.
Submissions will be written directly into a cache database - they are not written into the actual HCL directly. Submissions will then be approved, approved and edited or rejected from the cache.

In addition, you can now dynamically submit correction and update to ANY Hardware device in the HCL by clicking on the new link which can be found on the detail page for each device. This new link will take you to a modified HCL Submission form, where you can make changes to the particular HCD without having to go to any effort to fill in details of the existing listing!

View: HCL v4.10
View: Submit a new Device to the HCL

Since the sticky thread "2008 Forum Ideas, Bugs and Requests" in this forum specifically states that the requests/thoughts/ideas should relate to the forum (cfr. subject title and also the 1st paragraph of the first post there), I thought I'd post this in here since they are related to this subject. (C:Amie, please feel free to move my post to another thread if you feel it needs to be somewhere else)

Firstly, I noticed some text fragments that might cause confusion :
The HCL currently mentions that it is v4.10. However, at the top in the license agreement it states "Version 5.04". I have a feeling that the "v5.04"-fragment relates to the user agreement version, not the HCL itself, but you might want to consider putting the text fragment "user agreement" in front of the version number there, or perhaps even removing the version number completely in the terms & conditions. It might prevent misunderstandings...

I also have some ideas/thoughts regarding the HCL :
I think that it would be nice to have a picture/photo of the item in question there, it might make the HCL item page a bit more interesting in terms of looks.
Another thing that I noticed is that the overview list pages list item compatibility for 5 different OS versions, however it doesn't list compatibility for the latest versions (WM5, WM6 and WM6.1). I think that it's better to list the latest OS's there, since most people tend to buy new equipment than the stuff they already have, so I think that they are more interested in the latest OS's instead of the older ones.
(well, I can say that I am more interested in the newest devices and OS's )

Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts on this with you all. Hopefully the other members will also share theirs, it might turn up some interesting information regarding the HCL and possible future changes ?

Hey,

I've never heard anyone grumble over being confused re the version numbers, but it's not an unfair point. I'll add a clarification point the next time I shoot past the page in an IDE. The version number is required.

Photo's: This isn't an area that ASP3 is really any good at, it is very time consuming adding images, particuarly having to render each image to dimension without using ASP's nearest neighbour resizing and finally incredibly time consuming finding them.

You can change the operating systems to include any of the core CE releases. This site is strictly no Windows Mobile, Pocket PC or SmartPhone. Consequently you will never find WM# added to it by my hand. This site is proedominantly a legacy support site.

Thanks for your thoughts and idea's, I'll make the EULA adjustment.

Thanx for shedding light on the photo issue, C:Amie. I thought the idea of including photos was a very good one, but I did suspect that the system wouldn't be able to handle it well. Unfortunately, info on many of these legacy hardware items is hard to come by nowadays - search engines like Google don't turn up much in many cases. Wish we could find a practical answer to this problem.

There are components that allow photos/images to be resized "on-the-fly" on web servers, however in most cases webmasters don't have the necessary privileges to install these components on the web server.

There are also pure ASP classes available that can do this type of job. (although I haven't personally used these classes yet, so I can't comment on their functionality and/or quality)

A 3rd alternative is using .NET framework to perform this task. Some webservers have certain ASP.NET Graphics components preinstalled that can be used for this. The GDI library, for example, might be one of these preinstalled .NET components.

A 4th option is using a "cgi-bin" folder containing a (.dll) component that can do the job, this method might be available to webmasters. It's more likely that webhosts will allow this type of executables to be used compared to installing web components.

And there is yet another option : creating an ASP class yourself to handle the images. However, this approach requires thorough knowledge of ASP and extensive insight in all the internal file structures of image files (.BMP, .GIF, .JPG, .PNG). And I'm not even mentioning the mathematical knowledge to transform the original bitmap matrix to the the resized version (interpolation, resampling, ...).

I personally would opt to use option 1, 2, 3 or 4 if I had to achieve this type of task...

1) ISAPI's I don't want it is removes server portability and brings licensing issues into the equation
2) My experience of their quality is poor, usually not bi or trilinear
3) This would be the way I would do it, but we've not configured the servers for .net and have no plans to do so while we're on such constricted hardware
4) Same as ISAPI's

If and when the server situation improves, .net would happen, we almost did migrate to 2003 server after the february crash last year - there wasn't the budget though.